Tolerance cannot be measured in terms of degrees of intolerance. I am essentially opposed to burning books even when they incite others to violence. But freedom is either an absolute or it is conditioned on not inciting others to violence. Anything else is rationalized bigotry.

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Thursday, June 16, 2016

The BREXIT Campaign and why they think we are Stupid

How to examine the issue of our European
identity and Britain’s
current campaign to decide on whether we stay in Europe
or Leave it?

The EU has held up identity
politics as a means of empowering minorities at the expense of the majority.
The EU in its current form has marginalized the working classes, impoverishing
successive generations of the poor. Given the extremely high unemployment
position of European youth (the EU average is 19.4% as at February 2016) it is
not surprising that traditional fascism is once more on the march.

Britain has betrayed the working
classes, effectively reneging on its commitment to narrowing the gap between the
classes.In Britain, since 1976 there has been
a continuous deterioration in the position of the lower classes vis-à-vis the
middle to upper classes. Since 1976 every British parliament has recorded progressively
fewer MPs who were not educated within the private school system. We have been told that only the ‘lower
classes’ vote to leave - so now it is a simple class issue and we can assume
the implication that ‘they’ should stay ‘down’ in their ‘rightful place’.

So are immigration and economics the
only vital issues in the debate? Must our vote on the 23rd of June
be based on these two issues?There are
many issues causing unease within society.Unless we are able to discuss them all without fear of being labeled
something we are not then all we are going to receive are insults and
platitudes, and that is the summation of the debating tactics of both sides.

The half-truths thrown about by
both sides of the Brexit campaign have helped to discredit the campaign. We are
told that leaving will destroy much of the nations’ wealth and bring to an end
our comfortable way of life. We have even been told a Brexit could precipitate
a World War.The one constant of this
campaign has been the contempt demonstrated by all parties to the debate.Former Prime Minister, Sir John Major
described Boris Johnson as a likeable man and a court jester. Lord Stuart Rose
who is fronting efforts to keep Britain
in the EU dropped a bombshell when he admitted to a group of MPs’, big business
favors membership of the EU because it is depressing British wages. (Daily
Express Mar 3, 2016).The corollary is
that a Brexit would boost British workers' wages. The truth is that a Brexit
would cut off employer access to an unimpeded and excessive flow of cheap
labor.

It sounds bizarre that no-one has
criticized the low level of debate. Our politicians and business leaders, panels
of experts and the unions, across the board they have all been guilty of
engaging in a campaign of mendacity, half–truths sold as gospel and derision universally
waged against opponents.

This has not just been a dirty campaign, it has been a campaign that
has assumed we are all either too stupid or too greedy to listen to any
intelligent debate.

Binary prejudice is the idea that
we are blind to anything that does not fit into neat dualistic categories defined
by the most vocal or forceful group within society. It sounds like something
that could explain why our politicians and business leaders treat us so badly.

Something is or is not and there
is no room for shades of colour.It is
the simplistic argument of an uncomplicated, more brutal era. It is not that
old hatreds are returning; in many people they never went away but simmered
with malevolent patience just below the surface; a veneer of civility and calm.And then we are made to feel guilty that
arguments over immigration are just about prejudice, when they are not. Society
has lost its post World War 2 inhibitions which prevented the bigot from expressing
their prejudices or acting out their fantasies.Partly as a consequence of this renewed nihilism we are witnessing a
return to the expression of many of our old fears. Our security is conditioned
on practicing a McCarthyistic mantra (in the UK
it is mostly left of centre but in much of Europe,
fascism is also emphatically right-wing).An unintended consequence of our appeasement of Islamism has been that
it has encouraged both bloodshed and prejudice. Of greater threat to the
stability of society, it has led to a lack of credibility in government’s willingness
to protect the people. And that is a fundamental break in the social contract that
is at the centre of modern government.When
government does not acknowledge or address people’s fears over the personal
threat that extremism creates, a direct consequence is the counter-radicalism
response.

Economic and physical insecurity
has returned and we have also lost our moral compass. But are we that different
to the Europeans many of us want separation from or are we all assumed to be equally
stupid?

We have lost our way and a simple
example proves it:

On the 5th of June
2016 the Swiss government ran a referendum which proposed providing every person
with a basic income as a constitutional right.Put another way, it proposed paying all its unemployable citizens a wage
for life. Switzerland
argued that recognizing some jobs as having ‘disappeared’ meant that society
was responsible for not financially penalizing the ‘unemployable.’ The
resolution was defeated by a margin of over 3:1 (76.9% against to 23.1% for).

23% of people voted in favor and
many who voted against it would have done so from personal greed only!

Maimonides was a Sephardi philosopher,
astronomer, Rabbi and physician who lived from 1135-8 to 1204. He proposed ten
levels of charity, of which the highest level (and therefore the greatest act
of charity) was that a man (or woman) gave a fellow human being the means by
which they could support themselves and their family.If in the name of globalization we have lost
that Maimonidean understanding of human dignity as the Swiss surely have, then
truly, our society has lost its way. It is the obligation of society to care
for its people. It is not a national right for a nation to right-off its vulnerable members
of society, either by ignoring them or by paying them off.

If Europe
is not just a club but part of our shared destiny then it is an integrationist
enterprise which will one day come about through full fiscal union, creeping
legal annexation and the final act of creation - a federal European
super-state.Policy will then be imposed:
with federal diktat from the top and local negotiation on implementation passed
down to national parliaments.Am I
exaggerating this scenario?

In the three year period 2011-2014 66% of laws
and 67% of new offences enacted in the UK parliament came from the Council
of Ministers (European Commission). This Incrementalism is fundamental to EU
integration on a policy level.The issue
not being debated is that without political transparency and accountability the
EU is travelling at speed down a path to becoming no better than one more
corrupt dictatorship.

The EU is incapable of reforming itself without
a serious scare (which a Brexit would provide).That is something we should have been discussing.The EU has a vision – that shared destiny I
referred to earlier.We are not
discussing any of the issues that arise out of that vision.We are not dealing with any of the issues
that have always confronted human society because they are both philosophical
and political construction (and politics is by its nature, prejudiced).To discuss anything in practice would mean
getting our metaphorical hands dirty. Far easier to speak in generalities and
leave the detail to future generations.

This is the real reason everyone
in the debate is being so coy about the question of our relationship to the European
Union.

If no nation can stand alone then
what are the real differences between remaining in Europe and leaving the Union (given that even then we will be enormously
impacted by our relationship with the EU)?

The issues are of huge importance
and yet all anyone has done so far is to insult us and to attempt to scare us without
attempting to provide any serious discussion of the pertinent issues.The one thing we know with certainty is that all
predictions are forecasts and therefore not factual but based on personal bias.